George MacDonald Fraser | Books | The Guardian George MacDonald Fraser Thursday 3 January 2008 10.19 EST First published on Thursday 3 January 2008 10.19 EST Share on Messenger Close George Macdonald Fraser, who has died aged 82, was the creator of Harry Flashman, one of the bright gems of the English comic novel. Fraser was already 44, and a long-serving journalist, when he decided to leave his job as deputy editor of the then Glasgow Herald to write fiction. He had the happy idea of resurrecting Flashman, the cowardly bully of Tom Brown's Schooldays and seeing what happened to him after he had been expelled from Rugby school for drunkenness. The result was Flashman (1969), which saw the craven Flashy turned into a soldier, quaking with fear but still drinking and chasing women in the middle of the retreat from Kabul in the first Afghanistan war.

The book was original and very funny and it also, most unusually for a comic novel, gave readers a telling picture of life in England and the empire between 1839 and 1842: there were four closely-packed pages of notes at the back of the novel which proved the historical accuracy of what seemed like mere exuberant farce. It is hard now, with Flashman recognised as an international comic classic, to believe that Fraser had difficulty getting the book published. Flashman was turned down a dozen times before Herbert Jenkins, the small independent house best known for publishing PG Wodehouse, brought it out. Fraser followed it the next year with Royal Flash. This was a double literary conceit, with Flashman, a character from one Victorian novel, getting involved in the plot of another, Anthony Hope's 1894 classic The Prisoner of Zenda. The idea was that Hope had used Flashman's adventures to invent the tale of Rudolf Rassendyll, the Englishman who was the double of the King of Ruritania. Flashy gives the reader the true story, involving Bismarck and the Schleswig-Holstein affair.

The book also featured Lola Montez, the fabulous beauty of the age, and her lover Ludwig, the mad King of Bavaria. Ten pages of notes again told the casual reader that he was getting much true historical gen among the comic cuts. Bismarck and Schleswig-Holstein aside, Fraser's real interests were the British empire, the American civil war, and the wild west. The 12 books of the Flashman series feature many of the 19th century's major engagements: the slave trade in Flash for Freedom (1971), the Charge of the Light Brigade in Flashman at the Charge (1973), The Indian Mutiny in Flashman in the Great Game (1975), Custer's last stand in Flashman and the Redskins (1982), the Opium Wars in Flashman and the Dragon (1985), and the raid by the abolitionist John Brown on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in Flashman and the Angel of the Lord (1994).

In a late book of short stories, Flashman and the Tiger (1999), Flashman, up against Bismarck again, averts a European war in 'The Road to Charing Cross', is involved in a celebrated royal scandal concerning Edward VII in 'The Subtleties of Baccarat', and, in the title story, 'Flashman and the Tiger', he is found at the battle of Rorke's Drift before encountering Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson. Other Flashman books were Flashman's Lady (1977), Flashman and the Mountain of Light (1990) and the very last one, Flashman on the March (2005), about the Abyssinia Campaign of 1868. In every novel the notes confirm that while Flash's sexual high jinks and great feats of cowardice are fictional they are played before a real historical background. Sometimes the real events are very hard to believe.

Two women in particular - the "female Caligula", the black Queen Ranavalona of Madagascar in Flashman's Lady, and Jeendan, the nymphonmaniac Maharini who dressed as a dancing girl and ruled the Sikhs in their war against British India in 1845-46 - seem the work of a fevered imagination, but they turn out to be quite real historical figures. Fraser had no qualifications as a historian. He was born in Carlisle, the son of a doctor. He went to Carlisle grammar school and Glasgow Academy. He joined the army in 1943 and served with the Border regiment in Burma, part of the "forgotten" 14th Army. Oddly for a man who spent so much time writing about historical battles in his fiction, in his own wartime memoir, Quartered Safe Out Here (1993), with its hard-bitten opening sentence, "The first time I smelt Jap was in a deep dry-river bed in the Dry Belt, somewhere near Meiktila," he told of the war as seen by a rifleman in an infantry platoon and ignored the big picture.

The book was considered one of the great personal memoirs of the Japanese war. Fraser was given a commission at the end of the war and served as a lieutenant with the Gordon Highlanders in the Middle East until 1947. After the army he worked as a sports reporter on his home-town newspaper, went to Canada for a time, and then joined the Glasgow Herald. In 1971 he published, as well as two full length Flashman novels, a straight historical study of the Scottish border reivers, The Steel Bonnets. This was considered an important historical work. He returned to the subject in 1993 with The Candlemass Road, a short novel which at times seems like one of Daphne Du Maurier's historical romances, except that the love interest stops dead, perhaps realistically so. He wrote four other non-Flashman novels. Mr American (1980) is a rather old-fashioned adventure about an American mystery man who settles in England in 1910, becomes friendly with Edward VII and then turns out to be one of the Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid gang.

The Pyrates (1983) is a wild farce owing much to the stereotypes of old movies. Black Ajax (1977) is a fictionalised account of the real life of Tom Molineaux, a freed slave who became a bare-knuckle boxing champion in the late 18th and early 19th century. His very last book, The Reavers (2007), is set in Elizabethan England. Fraser also published three books of short stories, The General Danced at Dawn (1970), McAusland in the Rough (1974), and The Sheikh and the Dustbin (1988). A busy man of tremendous energy, Fraser claimed to have written 20 or 30 film scripts. Most of them were never made, but even so, he said, the money was very good.

The scripts that did reach the screen were The Three Musketeers (1974), The Four Musketeers (1975), Royal Flash (1975), The Prince and the Pauper (1977), the James Bond film Octopussy (1983), Red Sonia (1985), Casanova (1987) and The Return of the Musketeers (1989). Fraser perhaps reveals his literary raison d'être in 1988 with The Hollywood History of the World. In this unusual book, filled with pictures, he claimed that intellectual critics were wrong to condemn Hollywood for getting things wrong in the movies. He admitted that modern vernacular does sometimes seem unintentionally comic in the mouths of historical figures, and facts are often twisted to make a story, but still, he said, this is no worse than clocks chiming in Shakespeare's ancient Rome. He praised film costume and set design for giving contemporary audiences an accurate picture of the look of things in the past. "They have given a picture of the ages more vivid and memorable than anything in Tacitus or Gibbon or Macaulay," he claimed.

"It matters little that George Sanders had a knack of wearing Biblical armour as though it were made of well-cut tweed." It was not a popular view, and the book is the only one of Fraser's that is out of print. Fraser lived on the Isle of Man, not, he said, as a tax exile, but as an exile from the modern world. He said the island was like England used to be. He became something of a right-wing figure, hating political correctness (the Flashman books are full of the word "nigger"), and claiming to be very surprised at the way the liberal left had cheered the Flashman novels as attacks on the British Empire. They were not meant to be attacks, he said; he liked the British Empire, it had been a marvellous force for good in the world. He is survived by his wife Kathleen Hetherington whom he married in 1949, their two sons and one daughter.

· George MacDonald Fraser , writer, born April 2 1925, died January 2 2008 Ron Fritze: George MacDonald Fraser and Sir Harry Paget Flashman "In a good history, the judgement must be eminent; because the goodness consisteth in the method, in the truth, and in the choice of the actions that are most profitable to be known. Fancy has no place, but only in adorning the style." — Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan By Ron Fritze January 16, 2008 I recently had a sad experience. It was the start of the New Year and I was getting reacquainted with a couple of old friends when I learned that they had just died. Now you should understand that I never met either of these two dear friends in person. We never talked on the phone and never exchanged letters or e-mails, but I have known them for over thirty years. My friends were an author and his protagonist, and our only contact came through my reading the one's books and imagining the other's actions. I am talking about George MacDonald Fraser and his best known character, Sir Harry Flashman. A Loss Worthy of Reflection.

I was halfway through a pleasant reading of Fraser's latest Flashman novel, Flashman on the March. It was an experience of great enjoyment, flavored with nostalgia for the earlier novels in the series. Something distracted me and I drifted to other pursuits. I found myself browsing the Random House and Knopf websites, where I saw the announcement of Fraser's death. I had to put down the departed author's book and reflect on the loss. The news left me a little sad because Fraser's books have provided me with enjoyment and light entertainment since the middle of the 1970s. By the way, reading Flashman on the March was a somewhat delayed pleasure. The novel was published in 2005 and I never got around to buying it when it first came out. Eventually I procrastinated long enough to decide to wait for a cheap remainder copy, which finally materialized in my mailbox during the last half of December 2007. Yes, I know it, I'm cheap! We've all got our faults. I was introduced to Fraser and Flashman while working on my masters degree in history at Louisiana State University by my friend and fellow graduate student Randy Roberts, who has since become a successful author and teaches at Purdue University.

While Randy's specialty is twentieth-century American history, he is also deeply interested in Victorian Britain, so Fraser and Flashman were made to order for him. If I remember correctly, Randy told me that he was introduced to Flashman by Art Bergeron, then the graduate coordinator at LSU and a future historian of the Civil War. It's the Fiction, Not the Pictures. At that time the fourth book in the series, Flashman and the Great Game, was being serialized by Playboy. Randy loaned me the earlier issues featuring the serialization. I started reading and liked it. It wasn't long until the last installment hit the newsstand. I got to finish the story and wanted more. It has always been the claim of Playboy to publish all sorts of good fiction and non-fiction, which, of course, is why the magazine is so popular with college men and guys in their twenties. They buy it to improve their minds and get all that intellectual stimulus. Hey, my nose just got longer! Anyway, I can assure you that I just read the story and never glanced at the centerfolds. Ouch! For some reason my nose is continuing to grow. I don't know why, all of us guys say the same thing!

Meanwhile I got ahold of the three earlier Flashman novels and devoured them — and I've been reading them as they've come out ever since. Fraser and Flashman have been welcome companions most of my adult life. George MacDonald Fraser was born on 2 April 1925 and died from cancer on 2 January 2008 at the age of 82. Fraser was born at Carlisle in England to Scottish parents. He was educated in Scotland, served as an enlisted man in an Indian Division and as an officer in the Gordon Highlanders during World War II. During that time he was stationed in India, North Africa, and the Middle East, gaining experiences that would help to shape his fiction. During the 1950s and 1960s he worked as a reporter and deputy editor at the Glasgow Herald. He quit journalism in 1969 to write novels. Appropriating the Bad Boy to Be a Hero. His first novel was titled Flashman and appeared in 1969. It was the first of twelve books with Sir Harry Paget Flashman as the main character. This choice of a protagonist is the first indication of Fraser's cleverness and humor.

Flashman originally appeared as a character in the autobiographical novel Tom Brown's Schooldays by Thomas Hughes, which appeared in 1857. Tom Brown's Schooldays tells the story of Tom Brown's growing up and his time as a student at the Rugby School of Thomas Arnold (1795-1842), the famous Victorian Educator and the father of Matthew Arnold. As a boarding school for boys, Rugby was a place with many traditions, some rather barbaric. Older students hazed the younger students mercilessly. In Hughes' novel, the greatest persecutor was Harry Flashman, who is eventually expelled by Thomas Arnold for drunkenness. Fraser in his novels depicts the rest of Harry Flashman's life, imagining what would have happened to the rogue, scoundrel, and bully who was introduced to the world as Hughes' original schoolboy character. While the moralizing Hughes shows a defeated Flashman, expelled from Rugby in disgrace due to his own bad habits, Fraser conjures up a mature Flashman with an impressive pedigree. As introduced in the first novel of the series, Fraser's Harry Flashman has lived a long and successful life.

He has received a knighthood, attained the rank of brigadier general, and won numerous medals and honors, including the Victoria Cross and the Medal of Honor. According to the imaginary Who's Who biographical notice Fraser provides his readers, Flashman also participated in many of the great events of the nineteenth century: the Sepoy Mutiny in India, the charge of the Light Brigade, John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, the Taiping Rebellion, Custer's Last Stand, and the Zulu Wars among others. Action Hero or Anti-Hero? How could a cad like Flashman have accomplished so many great and seemingly heroic things? That is the question the Flashman novels answer. The stories they tell are not pretty in the sense of the classic hero tale, but they are funny, entertaining, and in terms of their historical settings, extremely accurate depictions of the era. Flashman is an anti-hero who in a cat-like manner always manages to land on his feet and usually comes out of a tough spot as a seeming hero. The Flashman behind the supposed man of action is a womanizer, a shirker, a coward, and just plain unscrupulous — but for all that, he's also basically a likeable fellow.

Fraser's novels assume the voice of an aged Sir Harry Flashman, reflecting on the events of his life in the style of a memoirist. These so-called Flashman papers were supposedly discovered in an attic. Fraser is merely the editor. He even provides the novels with appendices and footnotes, based largely on actual books of history. His effort to mimic the format of an authentic edited memoir was so successful that ten of the thirty-four American reviewers of the first Flashman mistakenly reviewed the book as an actual historical memoir instead of as a historical novel, a work of fiction and imagination. Fraser was very proud of that. The first novel, Flashman, tells of Sir Harry's exploits after being expelled from Rugby School during the years 1839-1842. Keep in mind, Fraser has placed Flashman's year of birth in 1822. Harry comes from a well-to-do family and secures a place in the army as an officer. His unit is stationed in a part of Great Britain that was experiencing some labor unrest. The troops are dispatched to the region to suppress it.

There Flashman meets and seduces the beautiful but seemingly thick-headed Elspeth Rennie Morrison, the daughter of a wealthy factory owner. No Factory, No Fidelity.... I'm Heading to India. When Elspeth's father discovers the romance, Flashman is forced to marry her — not such a bad situation for Harry because Elspeth is rich, beautiful, and very enthusiastic in the bedroom. Her father, however, is none too fond of his new son-in-law, who is absolutely not interested in staying at home to help dear old dad run the family's factories. Nor is Harry a one-woman man. Harry is released from his distasteful familial responsibilities soon enough when he gets sent to India with the army, where he proceeds to drink and wench to his heart's content. India is also where he develops a remarkable facility for learning languages quickly. Some might consider Harry's talent a bit hard to believe, but it is but not entirely without a basis in fact, albeit somewhat exaggerated. Sir Richard Burton, the real life African explorer, writer, and unexpurgated translator of the Arabian Nights, also had a preternatural talent for learning languages.

Cruel fate intervenes on Flashman's imperial idyll when he is dispatched to wild Afghanistan. In 1839 the British army had swept the country and captured its king, Dost Muhammad, replacing him with his rival, Shah Shuja. Dost Muhammad was sent to India as a prisoner. The main British army quickly returned to India but left a small garrison with the British envoys in Kabul. Flashman is sent to join the British delegation. While the British are supremely confident, the fiercely independent Afghans are plotting an uprising, which breaks out in November 1841. Two British envoys, Sir William Macnaghten and Sir Alexander Burnes, are murdered in early hours of the mayhem, and the British garrison and civilian dependents are surrounded and besieged. Negotiations occur and on 6 January 1842, the British troops and civilians are permitted to leave Kabul to make their way to India under promise of safe conduct. Instead they are dogged by Afghan fighters as they attempt to make their way through mountainous terrain during the height of winter. From Ne'r-Do-Well to National Hero.

Massacres take place and prisoners are seized, but the resourceful and lucky Flashman manages to find his way to the British fort at Jalalabad. Always looking to save himself, even if it requires the most craven behavior, Flashman is found at the Jalalabad fort in a state of unconsciousness, wrapped in a Union Jack, and surrounded by rampaging Afghans, who are driven off by a British relief force. As an apparently brave survivor of the tragic retreat from Kabul, Flashman is catapulted into the role of national hero. Presto! A chronic ne'r-do-well is launched on a successful and distinguished career. Flashman is not just a funny and entertaining novel. It is also a pretty good work of history. Of course Flashman is a fictional character, but many historical people appear in the novel, a motif Fraser follows throughout the Flashman series. Fraser does his research, too. His descriptions and characterizations of historical people emit a ring of authenticity. Fraser adroitly weaves his plot lines into the actual historical events rather than bending and breaking history for the sake of advancing the fictional narrative. His footnotes refer to real books, clearly the books he consulted to research his novels.

The reader actually can learn a lot of history and enjoy the genuine flavor of the Victorian era in Britain, its empire, and beyond. One book that Fraser cites in Flashman is Patrick Macrory's Signal Catastrophe: The Retreat from Kabul, Afghanistan 1842 (1966). Fraser calls it an "admirably clear account" and he was absolutely right. I found a remaindered copy in a London bookstore in the late 1970s and read it with great enjoyment. It also confirmed that Fraser was an author who carefully researched and faithfully depicted the historical settings of his novels.

Eleven more Flashman novels appeared: Royal Flash (1970) Flashman at the Charge (1973) Flashman in the Great Game (1975) Flashman's Lady (1977) Flashman and the Redskins (1982) Flashman and the Dragon (1985) Flashman and the Mountain of Light (1990) Flashman and the Angel of the Lord (1994) Flashman and the Tiger (1999) Flashman on the March (2005) There's Continuity in the Friskiness. The novels were not written in the chronological order of Flashman's career, but like the best writers — Fenimore Cooper's five Leatherstocking tales come to mind — Fraser pays close attention to Flashman's age, injecting each new adventure with believable continuity. With Flashman the one constant is that he is frisky to the end. The Wikipedia article, "Harry Paget Flashman," mentions that in 2006 Fraser said he was working on another Flashman novel, so perhaps there is hope for one final adventure.

That would be nice as we know from Fraser's bio of his protagonist that Sir Harry managed to fight for both sides in the Civil War, and that he also enjoyed some harrowing adventures down in the Mexico of Emperor Maximilian and Benito Juarez. Wouldn't it be nice to open the pages to a posthumous novel about one or both of those adventures? Royal Flash was made into a movie in 1975 with Malcolm McDowell portraying Flashman. The novel is sort of a Flashman-ocentric retelling of The Prisoner of Zenda with Otto von Bismarck as one of the characters. Unfortunately McDowell is miscast as Flashman. As described in the novels, Flashman is a handsome, large, and athletic man who appears to be the hail-fellow-well-met sort of chap, trustworthy and capable of all sorts of bravery. McDowell is too small, too weasely — and just not chummy enough to make do. Alan Bates, who played another character in the film, would have made a far better Flashman. Entertaining, Historically Accurate And Delightful to Read.

The latest and perhaps last novel, Flashman on the March, set during 1867 and 1868, focuses on Flashman's role in the British expedition to Abyssinia under the command of Sir Robert Napier. The British army invades Abyssinia because the Emperor of Abyssinia, Theodore II, takes as prisoners the British consul and some other Europeans. Naturally, they must be rescued, whatever the cost, and Flashman plays his usual venerous and devious role in events. As always Fraser has done his research with a studied thoroughness, and some of that research appears in his endnotes. One book he cites with great approval is Alan Moorehead's The Blue Nile (1962). It provides an excellent if brief account of the Abyssinian campaign and once again confirms that Fraser can write a wonderfully entertaining novel in an accurate historical setting. Fraser's Flashman novels are meant to be shared with others who love reading. They also could be used with profit as supplemental readings for college history classes, but there's a big problem with this concept: Sex, and too much of it for the tastes of some people.

Another potential issue is that Flashman is the type of oinker who shuffles through the worst nightmares of the politically correct. He's a sexist and a racist, although such concepts would have been completely alien to a gentleman of the Victorian elite. While the character Flashman is a sexist and a racist, the author Fraser is not. Women and native peoples are frequently depicted as more intelligent, braver, and more honorable than Flashman. Many of these very believable secondary characters could easily put the anti-hero to shame, but Harry Flashman does not feel shame like most of the rest of us. Fraser is so open-minded that he even depicts some Americans as heroic, cultured, intelligent, and altruistic. A Word to the Wise: Don't! That said, take my advice: Don't use these books in a class. They are a little too ribald and a little too politically incorrect for mainstream sensibilities. And let's face it, Flashman will not appeal to most women. While the female characters in the novels seem to flock to Harry, readers get to see the real man — and it's just not an attractive picture from a woman's point of view.

So I guess it is up to us guys to make sure that George MacDonald Fraser's heirs are not left huddling, hungry, cold, and in the dark. Also, lest anyone (especially you women) think I am a bit to narrow in my fiction tastes, I am eagerly awaiting the arrival of a cheap remainder copy of Fried Green Tomatoes by Fannie Flagg. I ordered it a week ago after learning of dear Fraser's demise. I quite enjoyed the movie Fried Green Tomatoes as I think Mary Stuart Masterson is a fine actor. Besides, I want to learn more about Alabama barbeque. Click on the black panther to read Ron Fritze's previous essay, "Of Old and New Friends." Historian, author, teacher, and higher education administrator, Dr. Ronald H. Fritze is Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Athens State University in Athens, Alabama. He has participated in CornDancer's cyber community since January, 2004.

Dominic West: it's time for a new Flashman film - Telegraph Book news Dominic West: it's time for a new Flashman film Dominic West dresses up as Flashman, George MacDonald Fraser's cowardly anti-hero, and says the novels are "waiting for a good revival" Dominic West as Harry Flashman Photo: REX FEATURES By Anita Singh , Arts and Entertainment Editor 4:02PM BST 16 May 2014 Dominic West has called for the “spectacularly politically incorrect” Flashman novels to be given the Hollywood film treatment and introduced to a new generation of readers. West said the books, by the late George MacDonald Fraser, were a “forgotten gem” deserving of reappraisal. Fraser took the character, who first appeared as the bully in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, and imagined a life for him in the British Army. A coward, misogynist and scoundrel, Sir Harry Paget Flashman was immortalised in 12 novels – the first of which was mistaken for a memoir by some confused US critics. The books continue to sell but West, an unabashed fan, said they deserve to be more widely read.

Related Articles Dominic West interview: No more Mr Tough Guy 04 Jun 2011 He would also like them to be adapted for the screen. The last Flashman film, Royal Flash, starred Malcolm McDowell and was released in 1975. Fraser disliked it and would not consent to another film in his lifetime. He died in 2008. Asked if the books were ripe for the Hollywood treatment, West said: “George MacDonald Fraser wrote the screenplay but had such a bad time on the film that he forbade anyone else to make any film about Flashman. So we have this perfectly preserved gem that’s just waiting for a good revival." The star of The Wire donned period costume to launch ‘Operation Flashman’, a sale of the contents of Fraser's library. Some 2,500 books are being sold by the Heywood Hill bookshop in Mayfair, from June 2. West acknowledged that Flashman was “horribly unpleasant” – the character commits a rape in the first book – but also very funny.

“He’s an antidote to all the rhetoric one hears about war and heroism, and when you read him it just cheers you up because he’s so funny,” West told Radio 4’s Today programme. “He’s totally unpalatable without the humour. If he wasn’t so funny, we wouldn’t be able to stand him. I don’t think he’s particularly nasty, but he’s sufficiently nasty to be called a rogue. “He is just so comforting to those of us who are cowards and flee from danger and pursue pleasure, rather than try to be heroic. “He’s spectacularly politically incorrect. Our times don’t really equate to high Victorian Empire nonsense and that’s partly what’s wonderful to escape to.” West said Flashman represented “those crazy empire builders and the incredible risks they ran for weird reasons like glory”. ‘Flashman’ Movie in the Works at Fox (EXCLUSIVE) | Variety ‘Flashman’ Movie in the Works at Fox (EXCLUSIVE) Alberto E.

Rodriguez/Getty Images March 4, 2015 | 06:06PM PT Fox is going back to the 1830s and is developing “Flashman,” a movie based on the period novels by George MacDonald Fraser and setting it up with Ridley Scott ’s Scott Free and Peter Chernin ’s Chernin Entertainment. The series was first published in 1969 and centers on Sir Harry Paget Flashman, who first appeared as the bully in the influential 1857 novel “Tom Brown’s School Days.” The Flashman character appeared in a dozen of Fraser’s novels and was portrayed by Malcolm McDowell in the 1975 film “Royal Flash.” The character is an antihero who often runs from danger but usually winds up being acclaimed as a hero. Daria Cercek is overseeing the project for the studio. Chernin is a producer on Fox’s Melissa McCarthy comedy “Spy,” directed by Paul Feig. Scott directed “The Martian,” which stars Matt Damon and opens Nov. 25.

George MacDonald Fraser (Author of Flashman) George MacDonald Fraser in Carlisle, The United Kingdom April 02, 1925 edit data He is best known for his Flashman series of historical novels, purportedly written by Harry Flashman, a fictional coward and bully originally created by Thomas Hughes in Tom Brown's School Days. The novels are presented as "packets" of memoirs written by the nonagenarian Flashman, who looks back on his days as a hero of the British Army during the 19th century. The series begins with Flashman, and is notable for the accuracy of the historical settings and praise from critics. P.G.

Wodehouse said of Flashman, “If ever there was a time when I felt that ‘watcher-of-the-skies-when-a-new-planet’ stuff, it was when I read the first Flashman.” George MacDonald Fraser, 82, author of 'Flashman' novels - The New York Times The New York Times Arts |George MacDonald Fraser, 82, author of 'Flashman' novels Search Continue reading the main story George MacDonald Fraser, a British writer whose popular novels about the arch-rogue Harry Flashman followed their hero as he galloped, swashbuckled, drank and womanized his way through many of the signal events of the 19th century, died Wednesday on the Isle of Man. He was 82 and had made his home there in recent years. The cause was cancer, said Vivienne Schuster, his British literary agent. Over nearly four decades, Fraser produced a dozen rollicking picaresques centering on Flashman. The novels purport to be installments in a multivolume "memoir," known collectively as the Flashman Papers, in which the hero details his prodigious exploits in battle, with the bottle, and in bed.

In the process, Fraser cheerfully punctured the enduring ideal of a long-vanished era in which men were men, tea was strong and the sun never set on the British Empire. The Flashman Papers include, among other titles, "Flashman" (World Publishing, 1969); "Flashman in the Great Game" (Knopf, 1975); and, most recently, "Flashman on the March" (Knopf, 2005). The second volume in the series, "Royal Flash" (Knopf, 1970), was made into a film of the same title in 1975, starring Malcolm McDowell as Flashman. In what amounted to an act of literary retribution, Fraser plucked Flashman from the pages of "Tom Brown's School Days," Thomas Hughes's classic novel of English public-school life published in 1857. In that book, Tom, the innocent young hero, repeatedly falls prey to a sadistic bully named Flashman. Advertisement Continue reading the main story In Fraser's hands, the cruel, handsome Flashman is all grown up and in the British Army, serving in India, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Now Brigadier General Sir Harry Paget Flashman, he is a master equestrian, a pretty fair duelist and a polyglot who can pitch woo in a spate of foreign tongues. He is also a scoundrel, a drunk, a liar, a cheat, a braggart and a coward. (A favorite combat strategy is to take credit for a victory from which he has actually run away.) Last, but most assuredly not least, Flashman is a serial adulterer who by Volume 9 of the series has bedded 480 women. (That Flashman is married himself, to the fair, dimwitted Elspeth, is no impediment. She cuckolds him left and right, in any case.) Readers adored him. Today, the Internet is populated with a bevy of Flashman fan sites. Flashman's exploits take him to some of the most epochal events of his time, from British colonial campaigns to the American Civil War, in which he magnanimously serves on both the Union and the Confederate sides. He rubs up against eminences like Queen Victoria, Oscar Wilde, Florence Nightingale and Abraham Lincoln.

For his work, Flashman earns a string of preposterous awards, including a knighthood, the Victoria Cross and the Medal of Honor. Fraser was so skilled as a mock memoirist that he had some early readers fooled. Writing in The New York Times in 1969 after the first novel was published, Alden Whitman said: "So far, 'Flashman' has had 34 reviews in the United States. Ten of these found the book to be genuine autobiography." Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up Privacy Policy The son of Scottish parents, George MacDonald Fraser was born on April 2, 1925, in Carlisle, England, near the Scottish border. His boyhood reading, like that of nearly every British boy of his generation, included "Tom Brown's School Days." In World War II, Fraser served in India and Burma with the Border Regiment. His memoir of the war in Burma, "Quartered Safe Out Here" (Harvill), was published in 1993.

After leaving the military, Fraser embarked on a journalism career, working for newspapers in England, Canada and Scotland. He eventually became the assistant editor of The Glasgow Herald and, in the 1960s, was briefly its editor. Tiring of newspaper work, Fraser decided, as he later said in interviews, to "write my way out" with an original Victorian novel. In a flash, he remembered Flashman, and the first book tumbled out in the evenings after work. "In all, it took 90 hours, no advance plotting, no revisions, just tea and toast and cigarettes at the kitchen table," he said in an interview quoted in the reference work "Authors and Artists for Young Adults." Advertisement Continue reading the main story His other books include several non-Flashman novels, among them "Mr. American" (Simon & Schuster, 1980); "The Pyrates" (Knopf, 1984); and "Black Ajax" (HarperCollins, 1997). With Richard Maibaum and Michael G. Wilson, Fraser wrote the screenplay for the James Bond film "Octopussy," released in 1983.

Fraser's latest book, "The Reavers," a non-Flashman novel, is scheduled to be published by Knopf in April. For his work, Fraser received many honors, among them the Order of the British Empire in 1999. The award, according to every conceivable news account, was entirely genuine. A version of this article appears in print on January 3, 2008, in The International Herald Tribune. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe George MacDonald Fraser - IMDb IMDb Writer George McDonald Fraser was an expert storyteller and master of the comic novel. His most widely read books chronicle the adult exploits of Harry Flashman (the original cowardly school bully of "Tom Brown's Schooldays"). Though fictionalised, these bawdy adventures are invariably set against an impeccably well-researched and annotated historical ... See full bio » Born: The top 10 impostors in fiction | Books | The Guardian The top 10 impostors in fiction From the Wizard of Oz to Tom Ripley, novelist Stephen May unmasks literature's most compelling pretenders A gift for lying ...

Matt Damon as Tom Ripley in The Talented Mr Ripley The top 10 impostors in fiction From the Wizard of Oz to Tom Ripley, novelist Stephen May unmasks literature's most compelling pretenders Stephen May Wednesday 12 March 2014 10.35 EDT First published on Wednesday 12 March 2014 10.35 EDT Share on Messenger Close Fakers, phonies and frauds: tragically these can be some of the most dazzling, most beguiling – and most fun – people you can meet. And what is true for life goes double for fiction. Writing my latest book which is partly about identity theft I realised I was part of a long literary tradition. Not that my hapless impostor really comes close to matching some of these rogues. 1. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L Frank Baum As everyone surely knows, the Wizard of this story actually turns out to be an ordinary old man, blown to Oz from Omaha in a balloon. Oz is a fable about the importance of self-belief, but also a commentary on how much power rests on simple tricks.

Oz tells us that charisma is not necessarily an innate quality restricted to a few exceptional individuals, but is a gift from ordinary people eager to have a hero to worship. In this case the wizard is a reluctant impostor – he doesn't want to be all-powerful, he just wants to return home and work in a circus. Don't we all? 2. Two Much by Donald E Westlake Art Dodge invents a twin brother so he can date two different women. It works pretty well until he gets confused, and one of the women thinks her boyfriend's brother has made a pass at her. She insists her boyfriend – Bart – confront his sleazy bro and wants to be there when he does. It's a problem. Of course it's no surprise that Art's losing the plot because he is also trying to stay one step ahead of some mobsters he has mortally offended. Writer Westlake was no stranger to false identities himself having published books under at least 16 names. 3. Matchstick Men by Eric Garcia Roy and Frankie are matchstick men – con artists. Partners in elegant crimes for years, they know each other like brothers. Frankie is the adventurous one, hungry for a big score. While Roy is the careful one.

But it is also cautious Roy who has to deal with discovering he has a spiky teenage daughter who wants to learn the grifting ropes. There are, disappointingly for British readers, no references to either the painter LS Lowry or the classic 1970s pop hit of the same title. 4. Madame Doubtfire by Anne Fine A messy divorce results in successful businesswoman Miranda Hilliard severely restricting the amount of time her three children can spend with their father, Daniel, an out-of-work actor. Daniel doesn't opt for any Fathers4Justice style stunts, but instead transforms himself into Madame Doubtfire, the nanny hired by his wife to look after the kids. It ends as you would expect, with the parents reconciling and the whole thing becoming a Hollywood vehicle for Robin Williams. A rare example of a fictional impostor who is also an example of humanity's basic decency. 5. The Life and Loves of a She-Devil by Fay Weldon Labelled a "she-devil" by her faithless husband, Bobbo, Ruth resolves to behave accordingly. Disappearing from his life so completely that Bobbo thinks she's dead.

Ruth is actually using a string of aliases to ruin his life and that of his mistress, the nauseatingly fragrant Mary Fisher. The increasingly extreme acts of vengeance climax in Ruth living in her Mary's mansion, having had plastic surgery to look exactly like her now dead rival. She is looking forward to Bobbo's release from the jail term she engineered for him, but only so she can make his life so miserable that prison seems like a golden age. Ruth is brutal and implacable. In a good way. 6. The Count Of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas The novel that tells us "All human wisdom is contained in these two words: wait and hope." Which seems about right. Edmond Dante is wrongly imprisoned, but escapes from jail and acquires a fortune. Creating the new identity of the Count of Monte Cristo, he dedicates his life to taking imaginative vengeance on his enemies, who learn his true identity at the moment the revenge is completed. As well as becoming the Count, our hero takes on at least eight other aliases during the course of the novel, including Sinbad the Sailor and, less believably, an English milord. 7.

The Man in the Iron Mask by Alexandre Dumas In this fantastically complicated Three Musketeers novel the man in the mask is Phillipe, the twin brother of the French King Louis XIV. Musketeer Aramis plots to swap the royal brothers, putting the twin on the throne as part of a long game which is intended to ensure that the new king will help his own rise to becoming cardinal and, eventually, Pope. Becoming Pope – surely what every self-respecting impostor should aspire to. 8. The Pardoner's Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer Possibly my favourite story ever. The essence of all crime fiction is contained in this story. Three men find some serious treasure. One goes to get celebratory hooch but is murdered by the others on his return. Unfortunately for his treacherous compadres he has poisoned the booze. A very effective parable about the dangerous effects of sudden wealth and one that should be read to all lottery winners. Its power is in no way diminished by being told by a clergyman who is also a fornicating drunkard offering sinners absolution for cash. 9.

The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith The first of a series of novels collectively known by admirers as The Ripliad, the books follow Tom Ripley a young man who murders a rich acquaintance, Dickie Greenleaf, and then assumes his identity. Unusually, the killer goes unpunished – rewarded even. This story ends with Ripley happily rich, having reverted to his own identity as the beneficiary of Dickie's will. There is a suggestion that he will be haunted by paranoia for the rest of his life, wondering if he "was going to see policemen on every pier". But you suspect he might be able to live with that. 10. Flashman by George Macdonald Fraser Introduced by Thomas Hughes in his 1840 novel Tom Brown's Schooldays as a bully and a coward, the Harry Flashman character was revived by George Macdonald Fraser in the 1960s as – well, as a bully and a coward. Not to mention an incorrigible womaniser. However, Macdonald Fraser's adult Flashman is also able to portray himself as a hero of Victorian wars from Afghanistan to the Boxer Rebellion.

Narrated with candid verve by Flashman himself, each rollicking adventure ends with our anti-hero more famous, more bemedalled and more attractive to society women than ever before. The stories are great but the real enjoyment of these books comes from the footnotes which offer a powerful insight into British colonial foolishness.

* This article was altered to remove an inaccurate biographical detail about Alexandre Dumas The best, 'peat-slathered', writers on the dark stories and stark geography of these inhospitable regions Published: 4 Jun 2014 From Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild to Jack London's White Fang, discover Brian Payton's favourite books about the land of big dreams and harsh realities Published: 5 Mar 2014 From Proust to the latest neuroscience, the psychologist and novelist rounds up the best reading on the 'slippery charms' of an essential faculty Published: 2 Apr 2014 From Elsinore to Charing Cross Road, novelist Niall Williams browses the best stories you can read about readers Published: 28 May 2014 George MacDonald Fraser - Writer - Obituary - The New York Times The New York Times Arts |George MacDonald Fraser, Author of Flashman Novels, Dies at 82 Search Continue reading the main story George MacDonald Fraser, a British writer whose popular novels about the arch-rogue Harry Flashman followed their hero as he galloped, swashbuckled, drank and womanized his way through many of the signal events of the

 19th century, died yesterday on the Isle of Man.

He was 82 and had made his home there in recent years. The cause was cancer, said Vivienne Schuster, his British literary agent. Over nearly four decades, Mr. Fraser produced a dozen rollicking picaresques centering on Flashman. The novels purport to be installments in a multivolume “memoir,” known collectively as the Flashman Papers, in which the hero details his prodigious exploits in battle, with the bottle and in bed. In the process, Mr. Fraser cheerfully punctured the enduring ideal of a long-vanished era in which men were men, tea was strong and the sun never set on the British Empire. The Flashman Papers include, among other titles, “Flashman” (World Publishing, 1969); “Flashman in the Great Game” (Knopf, 1975); and, most recently, “Flashman on the March” (Knopf, 2005). The second volume in the series, “Royal Flash” (Knopf, 1970), was made into a film of the same title in 1975, starring Malcolm McDowell as Flashman.

In what amounted to an act of literary retribution, Mr. Fraser plucked Flashman from the pages of “Tom Brown’s School Days,” Thomas Hughes’s classic novel of English public-school life published in 1857. In that book, Tom, the innocent young hero, repeatedly falls prey to a sadistic bully named Flashman. Continue reading the main story In Mr. Fraser’s hands, the cruel, handsome Flashman is all grown up and in the British Army, serving in India, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Now Brig. Gen.Sir Harry Paget Flashman, he is a master equestrian, a pretty fair duelist and a polyglot who can pitch woo in a spate of foreign tongues. He is also a scoundrel, a drunk, a liar, a cheat, a braggart and a coward. (A favorite combat strategy is to take credit for a victory from which he has actually run away.) Photo George MacDonald Fraser Credit HarperCollins, about 2004 Last, but most assuredly not least, Flashman is a serial adulterer who by Volume 9 of the series has bedded 480 women.

(That Flashman is married himself, to the fair, dimwitted Elspeth, is no impediment. She cuckolds him left and right, in any case.) Readers adored him. Today, the Internet is populated with a bevy of Flashman fan sites. Flashman’s exploits take him to some of the most epochal events of his time, from British colonial campaigns to the American Civil War, in which he magnanimously serves on both the Union and the Confederate sides. He rubs up against eminences like Queen Victoria, Oscar Wilde, Florence Nightingale and Abraham Lincoln. Advertisement Continue reading the main story For his work, Flashman earns a string of preposterous awards, including a knighthood, the Victoria Cross and the American Medal of Honor. Mr. Fraser was so skilled a mock memoirist that he had some early readers fooled. Writing in The New York Times in 1969 after the first novel was published, Alden Whitman said: “So far, ‘Flashman’ has had 34 reviews in the United States.

Ten of these found the book to be genuine autobiography.” The son of Scottish parents, George MacDonald Fraser was born on April 2, 1925, in Carlisle, England, near the Scottish border. His boyhood reading, like that of nearly every British boy of his generation, included “Tom Brown’s School Days.” In World War II, Mr. Fraser served in India and Burma with the Border Regiment. His memoir of the war in Burma, “Quartered Safe Out Here” (Harvill), was published in 1993. Photo The first Flashman novel. After leaving the military, Mr. Fraser embarked on a journalism career, working for newspapers in England, Canada and Scotland. He eventually became the assistant editor of The Glasgow Herald and in the 1960s, was briefly its editor. Tiring of newspaper work, Mr. Fraser decided, as he later said in interviews, to “write my way out” with an original Victorian novel. In a flash, he remembered Flashman, and the first book tumbled out in the evenings after work.

“In all, it took 90 hours, no advance plotting, no revisions, just tea and toast and cigarettes at the kitchen table,” he said in an interview quoted in the reference work “Authors and Artists for Young Adults.” Mr. Fraser’s survivors include his wife, Kathy; two sons and a daughter. Information on other survivors could not immediately be confirmed. Advertisement Continue reading the main story His other books include several non-Flashman novels, among them “Mr. American” (Simon & Schuster, 1980); “The Pyrates” (Knopf, 1984); and “Black Ajax” (HarperCollins, 1997). With Richard Maibaum and Michael G. Wilson, Mr. Fraser wrote the screenplay for the James Bond film “Octopussy,” released in 1983. Mr. Fraser’s latest book, “The Reavers,” a non-Flashman novel, is scheduled to be published by Knopf in April. For his work, Mr. Fraser received many honors, among them the Order of the British Empire in 1999. This award, according to every conceivable news account, was entirely genuine.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C12 of the New York edition with the headline: George MacDonald Fraser, Author of Flashman Novels, Dies at 82. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

Question: Which novel introduced the bully Harry Flashman
Answer: Tom Brown's Schooldays